In The Dictator, his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet Aladeen himself is so attracted to…
Even after a committee killed HB 1006, thecivil unions bill, late yesterday, filmmaker Mike Shum holds out hope. While the documentary creator says he doesn’t usually consider himself an activist, he was particularly moved by the recent round of civil unions discussion at the legislature — and wanted to do…
Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy Father, wracked with self-doubt about his new position, on a walkabout in Rome. Back at the Vatican, the cuddly cardinals who await his return square off in a round-robin volleyball tournament. The…
It’s one of those eternal questions: Which was better, the movie or the book? You may find the answer tonight, when Cinema in the Stacks, a monthly literary film series hosted by the Aurora Central Library, kicks off for the summer. For the most part, perhaps because the library is…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Twenty-something Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A glowing blonde dressed in white shrouds with a respirator as an accessory, Maggie claims to have been born in…
A good portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed soap, Dark Shadows…
Jonny Copp’s credo for the Adventure Film Festival he founded in Boulder was “Make Your Own Legends,” and while the climber/artist/musician/writer/adventurer made many legends of his own before his death in 2009, one of his greatest legacies may turn out to be posthumous, thanks to the Jonny Copp Foundation that…
Darren Bousman gets all the fun gigs. He directed Saw II, III and IV, the cult classic Repo! The Genetic Opera and his newest soon-to-be-cult-classic, The Dark Carnival. Has all this success turned him into an unapproachable ass-melon? Not even a little bit. We recently had a chance to talk…
Local production company Focus 4 Design, which has done many videos for this town’s music acts, has won two Telly Awards for its work on Global Dance Festival: The Movie. The film, which premiered at Beta Night Club in late February, follows both the production crew (conflict of interest alert:…
As she prepares for a dinner party and fields rude dismissals from her two spoiled sons, journalist Anne (Juliette Binoche) thinks back on her probing interviews for a just-filed French Elle profile of two student-prostitutes who cater to a rich “bored husband” clientele. That entering this line of work was…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, founding director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist. Clyfford Still: Inaugural Exhibition starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with…
Over the weekend, director Skip Armstrong and the Carbondale-based Forge Motion Pictures crew premiered Nomad and The Mother at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale. The films are the first in a planned five-part web series titled Of Souls+Water, profiling five different people whose lives revolve around water; the series…
Batura, Winograde, Kunkel, Emrich. Though the current shows at Robischon are a quartet of solos — Stephen Batura, Edie Winograde, Jerry Kunkeland Gary Emrich— they actually function together as a coherent thematic group show on the topic of the New West. Batura’s masterful and monumental casein-and-acrylic paintings capture scenes from…
Using a fluid naturalism to establish its afterglow vibe, Four Lovers follows two married couples as they swap partners and invigorate their own marriages in the bargain — for a time, at least. Boutique jeweler Rachel (Marina Foïs) is unable to resist tattooed Web designer Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle), so she…
There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…
Back with his first film in fourteen years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. That’s true with respect to both the singularity of his deadpan, dialogic style and his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s followup to 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, the urban-haute-bourgeoisie-as-endangered-species…
A twelve-year-old degenerate needs a spot for daily operations: someplace that’s secluded, where he can stash his collection of pornos and light a bunch of weird shit on fire, and no one will bother him. For my best friend Noah and me, the central vector for our troublemaking was behind…
Nick Apollo Forte, who’ll perform in Denver for the first time in two decades on Sunday, April 22, at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, is best known for playing the lounge singer Lou Canova in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. But Forte is much more than a singer: He started off as…
Disneynature’s latest Earth Day release hunkers down in an Ivory Coast rainforest, taming its beasts-in-the-wild raw material into a family-friendly (though not totally sugarcoated) heroes-and-villains adventure, as did the brand’s previous film, African Cats. Chimpanzee follows energetic young primate Oscar, still reliant on his mother, Isha, for food and protection…
It’s Nicholas Sparks’s world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written sixteen bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The Notebook was the third Sparks work…
